It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.
A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
